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Tommy rightly hailed a hero

Columnist

Hard Yakka ... It was an appropriate sponsor for Collingwood with Tom Hafey as coach in 1979.

Tom Hafey's death has generated an outpouring of sadness which, no doubt, will continue into Monday when his funeral will be held at the Melbourne Cricket Ground.

Among much else, Tommy's capacity to engender loyalty has been emphasised. In this important part of coaching he clearly possessed a rare aptitude. But it wasn't just with his players. Tommy also forged an unusual bond with fans.

One golden moment springs to mind: a cameo from 31 years ago. Tommy's time at his second club, Collingwood, was now over. Until things turned bad he had fitted in at Victoria Park as though born for the place: a salt-of-the-earth footy character in the football institution which most prided itself on that quality.

The holy grail of a premiership wasn’t delivered but the quest had been glorious. There was the phoenix from the ashes revival of 1977 with its drawn grand final and subsequent, seemingly pre-ordained, defeat. Two years later came the Harmes-inspired Carlton goal that put paid to another tilt at glory.

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Tommy's only uncertainty about the hairline boundary decision was as to whether the ball was three, or four, rows into the crowd when Wayne Harmes swept it back into play.

There were magnificently gutsy preliminary final wins over Geelong in consecutive years at Waverley: the Pies were lucky to hang on in '80 and had no right to win in '81. But they did; only to lose the following week in each case. Then, by halfway through 1982, Tommy was sacked.

Five straight years of top three finishes, grand final appearances in four of them, counted for nothing when measured against a 1-9 start to that sixth season. That Collingwood was a club in turmoil didn’t help.

Geelong came knocking. Tommy's three-year stint at Kardinia Park would turn out to be the least fulfilling of his coaching career. It produced a moment, though, which surely prompted the leathery skin covering the sculptured musculature of the famously T-shirted coach to break out in goosebumps.

Tommy didn't have to wait long for a crack at the club that had recently dumped him. The Cats were drawn to play at Collingwood in the second round of 1983. Both teams had won first-up; the stage was set. And under their new coach the Cats were flying. They produced a seven-goal opening quarter for a 29-point lead.

Yet at quarter-time, as Tommy ran down the steps and onto the ground to address his players, Victoria Park rose to him. Think about it: Collingwood five goals down at home and their fans hailing the opposition coach a hero!

As much as such a gesture can be interpreted, this one bore no irony towards those who had engineered Hafey's demise. It was a spontaneous reaction born of affection and gratitude. If Tommy didn't have a lump in his throat, many others did.

Alas, neither the promising start nor the early warm feelings were sustained at Geelong. That Hafey's coaching stints became progressively shorter was probably due to an unbending belief that his methods required no revision. Indeed, he continued to express this, from the commentary box, as new strategies emerged in the 1990s.

Sometimes there is a fine line between loyalty to an idea, or a player, and stubbornness. Tommy's great mate Kevin Bartlett loves to joke that the old coach long ago warned him: "Don't fall for this handball business. It's a fad."

With such a mindset, there would inevitably be collisions with club administrators. Indeed, on that battlefront, Tommy bears a similarity to cricket's Ian Chappell. Both believe officialdom largely exists to obstruct those at the coalface. Both have been stubborn, frustratingly so at times. And both - among key figures in their largely coinciding time in different sports - generated unparalleled loyalty from the players they led.

It's a touch contrary, given that Hafey will always be regarded as quintessentially old-school, that his final coaching job would link him to football's new world order. The year 1988, in which his coaching days came to an end, was football's equivalent of 2 AD.

Football had begun its expansion the previous year. And while Tommy embraced Sydney, along with the glitz of its private owner, he would subsequently rail against much of the changing football landscape. His great years were in the previous epoch. A significant component of the sadness at Hafey's passing is that he was the embodiment of a football time past.

As Elliot Cartledge wrote in the introduction to his outstanding book, The Hafey Years, his golden days were a time that "...echoes parts of a long-gone Melbourne, whereby champion sportsmen owned milk bars or pubs or worked nine-to-five in offices or in a trade. The city lived for football and stopped for football. And with four flags in eight seasons, soaring crowds, headline after headline and a host of football names, the Tigers - for a moment in time - ruled the land.”